Brain Scanner Can Read People's Intentions

Vainglorious Coward writes "Reality continues to catch up with Nineteen Eighty-Four with the announcement of the development of a brain scanner that can read a person's intentions. 'It's like shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall,' said the leader of the project, Professor John-Dylan Haynes . Demonstrating his own mastery of doublethink, Haynes continued 'We see the danger that this might become compulsory one day, but we have to be aware that if we prohibit it, we are also denying people who aren't going to commit any crime the possibility of proving their innocence.'"

Pfft.

Not without cracking my DRM, you bastards!

Re:Pfft.

I knew you were going to post that! Ha-ha!

*disappears in a puff of logic*

Minority Report and other Sci-Fi

Well they still have some way to go before they reach Minority Report levels.

As for interrogating people I guess it would not so much be their intentions as if whether they are telling the truth or not that is interesting.
A scanning would probably take quite some time and involve people being questioned at the same time.
Of course there are big ethical questions in this, I guess the anti-terror people in CIA and FBI would be quite interested in getting their hands on this technique, that is if they don't already use it.

One scary place this could be used was to check religious beliefs, in some countries you are prohibited to believe anything else than what the state dictates.

The intention part would also efficiently could be used for directing different robotics, as for example a fighter plane, which I seem to recall they have been working with something like this for the pilots for quite some time, to save the reaction time from the hand brain to pushing the button or whatever. I do remember some sci-fi movie about this at some point, but it is about to become reality also it seems.

The likely future for this

Seriously, once you ignore the helpful details of this technology (helping disabled people, or performing real scientific studies), you're only really left with a technology that's not far separated from a lie detector (and likely to have the same success rate and ease of cheating). The results of one of these things will not be admissible in court and it will be VERY easy to cheat it.

I really look forward to seeing the results of this machine tested on clinically defined sociopaths, psychotics, and delusionals who will no doubt prove the machine incapable of accurate results on them. Once those with mental illness disprove it, most mental health spokesmen will be denouncing the technology because they believe almost all humans have varied degrees of these illnesses already.

Briefly about MR: I think there's another large separation here. Actually, a couple. First, Minority Report was only about preventing murder and rape. All other crime was untouched (and even rising). Another distinction is that Minority Report assumes the lack of lawyers and a courtroom, which might be more justified considering their technique relies on psychics, which are theoretically (in cinema) more accurate.

Re: Minority Report and other Sci-Fi

In many Muslim countries apostasy is a crime punishable with death.

Re: Minority Report and other Sci-Fi

From Wikipedia:

Today apostasy is punishable by death in the countries of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran, Sudan, Afghanistan, Mauritania, the Comoros and, most likely, Iraq. Similarly, blasphemy is punishable by death in Pakistan. In Qatar apostasy is a capital offense, but no executions have been reported for it.

Re: Minority Report and other Sci-Fi

You are confusing apostasy, which is defined specifically as 'once being a member of a religion, but turning away from that religion' as opposed to simple 'belief in something else'. Apostasy is thought of in pretty much every religion as betrayal, since you were 'saved' but you turned your back on the truth, whereas if you are merely of a different belief, the attitude is more of pity for the 'ignorant unsaved'. In addition, in Islam, Jews and Christians get a 'not quite as benightedly stupid as everyone else' rank for believeing in the same God; they are called 'Dhimmi' or people of the Book.

Re: Minority Report and other Sci-Fi

That's not quite true.

Okay, being Jewish gets you citizenship in Israel, making Jewish foreigners and their children the majority of current citizens. However, the Israelis did not ethnically cleanse all of the original inhabitants: a minority of Muslims, Christians and Druze still live there.

A better candidate for a state with a required religion is probably the Vatican, whose 600 citizens are all Roman Catholic, mainly clerics.

But this question of states with a compulsory religion is a bit of a red herring. The real danger with this technology is repressive states in general. What if all dark-skinned foreign nationals entering US airports have to take this glorified polygraph in order to check for unAmerican thoughts? What if Tony Blair decides that all new UK citizens need this machine to verify whether their oath of the allegiance to Liz Windsor is genuine?

Re:Germany, for one

Wrong. It's a crime to deny the holocaust. It's not a crime to not talk about it.

So if someone asked if you thought the holocaust happened you could just not answer if you didn't want to talk about it.

But thanks for playing the I think I know the law game.

Tom

The quote espouses a fallacy

You cannot prove innocence. That's why our verdicts are "guilty" and "not guilty". As much as you can prove anything about reality, you can only show that an event occured; you'll be hard pressed to show that it never did, and it's at least approaching the impossible to show that it wasn't /going to/ happen. Not to mention that intentions and actions are two very different things.

This is a scary, scary device. Props to the submitter for recognizing the professor's justification as doublethink.

Re:The quote espouses a fallacy

You cannot prove innocence. That's why our verdicts are "guilty" and "not guilty".

These two statements are not logically related. Did you mean them to be? Our verdicts are "guilty" and "not guilty" because under the U.S. system you must be indicted for a crime, at which point you are presumed innocent. The logical question at trial is not "is he innocent", but "is he guilty".

You can "prove" innocence to the same, imperfect degree that you "prove" guilt: by presenting evidence to that conclusion. A strong, defensible alibi is evidence of innocence, while eyewitness accounts are evidence of guilt. We never formally "prove" guilt in a court, at least not in the mathematical sense--even when sending someone to the Electric Chair, we're merely "pretty sure he's guilty". There's nothing stopping us from creating a hypothetical where U.S. courts presume guilt, and it's up to you to prove your innocence once you've been charged.

We don't do that because it's stupid in practice--we want to limit the power of those in government, and a "presumed guilty" system encourages abuses of prosecution. It's just too easy to put the mechanisms of the state in service of tyranny, which is kind of what the people that founded this country were trying to avoid. But this has *nothing* to do with whether guilt or innocence can be proven, formally.

Re:The quote espouses a fallacy

This is a scary, scary device.

Don't be silly, it can't do anything that a wife can't do. Hmmm, on second thoughts...

Wake me when they invent a mobile MRI

Until then you're going to be sitting in front of a gigantic machine. MRIs aren't small portable or cheap at this moment.. and I don't see them following the computer timeline (from room sized boxen to the same power in a cell phone 30 years from now) any time soon.

Maybe I'm wrong though..

Re:Wake me when they invent a mobile MRI

The big problem with MRI machines is the amount of magnetic shielding they need. Some big MRI machines would cause all compasses in the radius of a few miles to point at them if they weren't shielded properly.

Actually, it's the other way round: The signals that the detector needs to pick up are so incredibly faint that any radio transmitter within a few miles would cause the detection of complete garbage instead of a useful signal.

The magnetic field actually drops pretty quickly. You need to shield the MRI machine from the environment, not the other way round.

Other issues that complicate making a "portable" MRI machine include the amount of support machinery needed for the superconducting magnets (big-ass refrigeration)

Very Disturbing

There is, as of yet, no laws prohibiting thinking about commiting a crime. The potential to change this is at least as scary as anything else the government or major corporations are doing to peel off our freedoms.

I'm no tinfoil-hatter, but wow.

Re:Very Disturbing

There is, as of yet, no laws prohibiting thinking about commiting a crime.

I think about commiting crimes quite a bit. How would I rob a bank, for instance? Or "disappear" someone, without getting caught? If my country was occupied by a foreign army, what could I as an individual do to cause maximum damage to it?

These are interesting and fun mental exercises, and of course novel writers think about this kind of stuff all the time. I just do this stuff in my head, and that's where it will stay. It does worry me however that these days it seems the law is beginning to view talking about doing something as if it was proof you will actually do it. If I had a friend that also liked doing this kind of mental exercise, and we discussed this kind of stuff via IRC, for instance, in the not too distant future I could envisage getting a visit from the police, or even ending up in jail, just for talking about stuff.

Re:Very Disturbing

"There is, as of yet, no laws prohibiting thinking about committing a crime".

Strictly speaking, this is no doubt true. After all, how could you frame such laws, and how would you determine if anyone were guilty of breaking them?

On the other hand, conspiracy is a crime and may be a very serious one, punishable by long periods in prison. What is a conspiracy? It may be no more than two people discussing some things that they *might* do some time in the future. No criminal act, you see. But still deemed to be a crime. Why is conspiracy a crime and not intention? I believe the real reason is simply that intentions have not previously been detectable or provable.

There is a deeper, far more worrying implication. These and other similar experiments have shown that researchers can sometimes know exactly what another person is going to do *before that person himself knows*. (We'll ignore that 70 percent accuracy rate for the time being). I think you will agree that drives a coach and horses through the idea of free will, and hence of criminal responsibility. If you can know, before I make up my mind, that I am going to commit a crime, and you arrest me for that intention - or just to prevent the crime - how can anyone possibly argue that I made a decision to commit the crime? I never got that far!

I have always thought that the dichotomy between free will and predestination was fallacious, based on a lack of imagination or accurate language. I have an apple; I can either eat it, or leave it. Which will I do? Imagine God, who knows everything past, present, and future. He knows if I am going to eat the apple, just as he also knows when and how I shall die. If you prefer a non-religious alternative, consider the universe as a four-dimensional space in which all future events are just as fixed as past ones. Either way, the future is predetermined.

Yet, at the same time, we have free will from our own point of view - because we don't have any way of knowing what will happen in future, even the things that we are going to do. Until I have either eaten the apple or put it away, I may not know what I am going to do. Similarly, armed with a knife and faced with someone who has wronged me, I may either stab them or not. Do I "choose"? Well, yes, or the word "choose" means nothing. But there isn't a little man in my head making decisions for me. In short, when we say someone chooses to do something, it is mostly a "black box" description that is useful for talking about other people. Look inside yourself for choice, and it isn't really there. It's like a rainbow - visible only from a distance.

Experiments like these will eventually force us to confront the fact that punishing people for their "moral choices" is inconsistent with our scientific knowledge. We may well *choose* to go on doing so anyway, of course. Or we could shift our ground a little, and say that punishment is a way of conditioning people not to commit crimes - adjusting the expected outcome so that it is less likely to be an attractive one.

Scene: A Police Lab...

Inspector Plod: "So Doctor, what are the miscreant's intentions?"

Doctor Tinkle: "He intends... 'to get out of this bloody MRI scannner as soon as possible'. Funny, that's exactly what the last twenty seven suspects intended as well."

Don't Scaremonger

Ohh c'mon people. This is interesting from a brain research perspective but it hardly provides any reason to worry about arresting people for their intentions.

We already have a much more reliable and convenient way to judge people's criminal intent, namely their body language and facial expression. Evolution has nicely provided us a way of distinguishing between your loving significant other who is absently gesturing with the knife he was using to cook and your jilted lover who is coming after you with it. Shop owners pick out people who look like their about to steal all the time. We are just sane enough not to throw people in jail for 'looking suspicious.'

Besides this machine is only set to measure what someone is currently preparing to do (as in seconds) trying to decode someone's long term plans is similar only in that both would require looking at the brain. This story shouldn't really raise anyone's estimate of the feasibility of reading someone's long term plans, or their eventual actions. It's nothing but an excuse for someone to spin a scare story.

In any case if the goal is to jail future criminals decoding their future plans seems wholly besides the point. It would be more effective to try and predict how much impulse control someone has or their resistance to temptation than to figure out if they currently have a plan to commit a criminal act.

--

As an aside I don't see what the doublethink in that comment was. It is true, if we did have a means to demonstrate a lack of intent to say blow up a plane then people who did so wouldn't need to be inconvenienced by all the crazy carry on restrictions. It might not be a compelling argument to use the technology but it isn't 'doublethink'.

Timing issues

I think this is misleading.

Functional MRI measures changes in blood oxygenation, which are indicitave of changes in neural activity. However, the hemodynamic response is slow, peaking about 6 seconds after the changes in neuronal firing rates. The decisions described in the article probably happen within milliseconds. The article is short on details, but what they probably did was analyze the data from the decision moment after the fact and see if they could use it to predict the subsequent action. This is different from actually knowing what someone is going to do before they do it, which is something that is practically impossible with fMRI due to the timing issues.

Interesting but exaggerated

Ok, I work as a post-doc in the field and actually know the work of Haynes. They are not predicting someone's actions. Their fMRI data can distinguish between their subjects' state of mind after the fact. There are several fundamental differences between this experimental set-up and real action prediction. One of them is that fMRI doesn't yield a reliable signal until 6 seconds after the decision has been made. Another one is that in this experiment the action was carried out, i.e. it was not a hidden intention. In this experiment, subjects had to hold on to their decision during a variable time; i.e., they had to wait for a signal before taking the action, but they had to perform it. So in reality, the experiment looked at the process of holding on to a certain intention, and that intention was rather artificial. And it still cannot be done without knowing the outcome of the action, i.e., a large number of samples has to be taken with the subject's cooperation before any "prediction" can be made. So I would conclude that, interesting as the outcome may be, the article is highly exaggerated.

They need to define "Bad intentions"

If someone (say, the infamous "terrorist") walks around planning to do something bad, I'm sure in his mind it's recorded as doing something good. How is this system supposed to tell what's good and bad?

Dear God

I hope that we never reach a time where the majority of people accept the idea of "proving one's innocence." That innocence is presumed while guilt must be proven is at the very bedrock of any free society and god help us if that ever truly changes.

"If my thought dreams could be seen..."

"...they'd probably put my head in a guillotine," as Dylan sang.

Quite apart from the ethical concerns this technology poses, the following tidbit is truly fascinating:

The researchers are honing the technique to distinguish between passing thoughts and genuine intentions.

I'd like to see if the technology could be harnessed for monitoring creativity, which is in one sense "passing thoughts." Suppose you could decipher activity that amounts to what we call inspiration. Now, with a feedback loop mechanism, you could see what affective states produce your best ideas.

I want one of these to play with before the Thought Police get them.

Re:Whats wrong?

Whats wrong with you guys? Where are the tin-foil hat jokes?

I guess you're not up on the latest research... here's a summary in common language.

It's the science man!
By making the joke and acknowledging the hat you weaken its mental reflection capabilities. Tin foil hats actually work (queue the non-believing corporate servants) by combining the radiated electromagnetic energy from your brain with the conductive qualities of the tinfoil. Over time, usually three to six months, the tinfoil's electromagnetic field begins to take on the qualities of the brain waves its been receiving, this build-up of energy results in a perfect mask for your particular brain patterns... true mental reflection. To take a term from pipe smoking... the hat is seasoned. By thinking about the hat and concentrating your mind on it existence you begin to create a specific energy pattern that counteracts the seasoned fields you've already created. The hat will still work, but there will be small holes in the energy field that are weaker and that will allow external monitor devices to measure your brain activity. The results are still fuzzy, but given secret technology the government may have now or a large enough computer (Blue gene based system would be fine) a good psychoanalysis team could read you like a book.

Best practices
Although there is some debate in the psycho-obfuscation and privacy communities about the shape of the hat, the real issue is mental blindness to the existence of the hat. Most people can't forget that they have a large pointy tinfoil hat on their head, but they can forget that they've placed a layer of tinfoil with a small (1cm diameter or less is best) criss cross pattern of wires inside of their baseball cap.

It goes without saying that you should never share a tinfoil hat with someone else. The combination of brain patterns will weaken the overall effectiveness of the hat and will make you susceptible to brain scanning and false thought recognition (caused by latent electromagentic patterns from previous wearer).